I love you for completing me, in every possible way. I cannot imagine life without you! 😘

You haven’t changed a bit in all the ways that matter!
And so …

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
        For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
        That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

— The Bard (as rendered by the Dench)

If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers,
for bread is food for the body,
but flowers are food for the mind.

— Galen of Pergamon

Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

— James Oppenheim

Reading this beautiful conversation on Tumblr, led to this lovely page on Wikipedia.

I love to write.
Correction, I need to write.
Writing helps me think, to be deliberate about things, to slow down.

At the same time, writing is also a slow, plodding process for me. Every post seems to take forever. So many years of doing it and it does not get any easier.
I agonise over what I want to say, the picture or quotes I want to include, the overall arc of my thoughts, the structure, everything has to be just so.¹
I’ve lowered the bar, to build consistency, with my #100WordHabit and now I have a new problem. First, I could not get started, and now I cannot stop once I get started.
I just have to finish my thoughts, my post, and that sometimes takes hours.
Which brings me back to me not wanting to start, for the fear that nothing else (that are in fact, more important) will get done.

This in turn, brings me to the brainwave I had a couple of days ago, in the bath.²
The pressure comes from wanting to publish what I write, the day I write.
What if, I didn’t?

Nothing has to change. With the exception of a hard stop.
One hour.
One hour to write and publish.
Or one hour to write and then put my pencil down.
And then I can come back to it the next day.
Yesterday’s post was the result of this approach.
I wrote it over two days, in two one hour sessions.
Very like Abby’s rain lillies up up above. They are prepping through the year, to bloom at this time, every time. Just because I cannot see it, does not mean nothing’s happening

One downside, that I potentially see, is that I will use this as an excuse to slack.
I hope I don’t.
But then on the other hand, without a pressure control valve like this, I can very easily see myself burning out again.

So let’s see how this goes.
I’m betting on me being a rain lily.

Like a bird on a wire …

Like a fish on a hook …

I have tried in my way to be free

— Aaron Neville, singing Leon Cohen’s, Bird On A Wire

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

— Louise Glück, Nostos. (via @ashstfu on Tumblr)

How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.

— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive (via, @melodybookshaven on tumblr)

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

— E.E. Cummings, via The Marginalian

Some poor soul on Tumblr, seems to’ve been traumatised by cursive as a kid.

While my chicken scrawl is legible only to me mostly, I love the doing of it. The actual writing. (I do write legibly if someone else has to read it, mostly Abby, Mom or Priyanka¹)

Peter Morwood, in his beautiful post, makes a lovely point as well …

Also, learning to write cursive meant learning to read cursive (it would have been hard to separate one from the other!) which is a useful skill when looking at historical stuff, and which might prove a problem for future Professional Historians who weren’t taught cursive, so will have to learn it from scratch.

The thought that I’ve stumbled into some niche skill by attrition and accident, makes me smile :)

this morning
i told the flowers
what i’d do for you
and they blossomed

— Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

Petals unfurl
    from a delicate flower,
    closer to picked
    with each
    passing hour,
    losing the I
    and gaining
    an our.

— Michael Faudet, First Love, Dirty Pretty Things

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

— Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

I recently read Scott H. Young’s article on How to Learn Vocabulary in Another Language and realised it would be a handy guide for me, as I go about increasing my French & Urdu vocabulary.

This is what I took away:

• The first 2000 words will cover 80-90% of a language’s vocabulary. 3000 will cover 95%. That should be your goal.
• Use a frequency dictionary, then according to frequency do 1000/2000/3000 words
• 10000 will lead to almost being fluent. Hard to do that quickly with French, sitting in India. But, aspirational goals :)
• Do:
  • Flash cards, knowing that this will not teach you the nuance and flavour and texture of French
  • Graded reading, Like the article states

  To successfully guess the meaning of a new word from its context, we need to understand between 95% and 98% of the surrounding words. This is difficult to achieve with native-level materials. Graded readers, which deliberately limit vocabulary, can be beneficial here.

  • If you’re doing the slow and steady way, because you lack the time, then growth will be slow. Assume 400 new word families a year
  • Use the four pillars of learning. Paraphrasing & Quoting the article:
    1. Meaning-focused input.
       Input provides the raw data for learning new words and enriches the contextual associations of words studied deliberately elsewhere. This includes conversations, books, films, television and other media that you attend to primarily for their meaning.
    2. Meaning-focused output. (Note: I am focussed on reading and writing)
       Speaking and writing are more difficult than simply understanding particular words from input, as using words correctly requires a more precise knowledge of each word and its meaning.
    3. Language-focused learning.
       This is the deliberate act of memorizing words, studying flashcards, or receiving explanations about word meanings. Webb and Nation argue that this should account for ~25% of the time spent learning a language.
    4. Fluency development. (I don’t know how I’ll do this. Re read stuff? Watch TV again.)
       Finally, attention should be paid to activities that speed up the understanding and production of words already known. Familiar materials that enable quick reading or conversations on familiar topics may not be needed to build new vocabulary, but they reinforce what was learned previously.

Memories of a trip, from a few years ago.
This was the second best vacation¹ I’ve had!

You are allowed

nay, encouraged to …

• buy books you’ll never read
• abandon books halfway through
• read your favorites over and over again
• read ‘easy’ books
• read books you don’t totally understand
• just look at the pictures
• start in the middle
• take notes
• break spines
• read the book after you saw the movie
• skip the boring parts
• keep books out of sentiment
• bring a book everywhere
• read comics
• return books to the library unread

The point, my dear reader, is joy.

— stolen verbatim from Lady Grey’s Library on Tumblr

Now that life’s getting busier and busier, with lots more things on my plate, ye olde system of writing the day’s tasks down on paper does not work any more. Specially since, I’ve begun logging clock times¹. Writing them down by hand is a giant pain.
This is what the plan’s begun to look like.

I wanted to see, if Org would let me replicate what I did my hand, natively.
Which in a nutshell was to look at the day sheet (on paper) for the nitty gritty and my organiser (currently my tasks.org file) for the big picture view.
I bounce between the two often. And discrete focus is something I wanted to keep.

The focus from wide …

to narrow. And back …

A bit of searching and this is the result! Woohoo!

Like I mentioned above, I hit C-x n s next to my day’s headline to narrow the scope to just today. And a C-x n w gets me back to the thirty thousand foot view.
I think of them as, s for slim and w for wide, to keep them straight in my head.
I’m intuiting this is Org’s Sparse Tree Magic at play here. But learning that wizardry is a thing for another day.

The important bit for me, is that I can focus when I working, without getting distracted.
And then when I need to, zoom out to review what progress looks like and make changes, if I need to.

I feel a bit sad though. I’ve given up book notes on paper. I’m giving up planning my day on paper. It feels like I’m losing something tangible. I miss paper.

To quote Sara Bareilles’, Orpheus …

Don’t stop trying to find me here amidst the chaos
Though I know it’s blinding, there’s a way out
Say out loud
We will not give up on love now,

No fear, don’t you turn like Orpheus, just stay here
Hold me in the dark, and when the day appears
We’ll say
We did not give up on love today

You will always be the better half, of the two of us 🙂

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

— Barbara Ras, via Maria Popova

If you get there before I do
Wade in the Water
Tell all of my friends I’m coming too
God’s gonna trouble the water

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children … 🎵

The last five years have been, to put it mildly, a bit trying.
I lost my father, my brother, my clients¹, and quite a bit of my sanity.
I lost a lot of weight and then gained it all again.
The career pivot is going slower than expected.
I feel pettily jealous of the bright young minds I mentor, when they go on to accomplish great new things, while I am here, clawing the mud.
There are days, I don’t want to get out of bed at all.

And then I have to remind myself, that all of this could change in an instant.
There was no way I could be sure when I slept yesterday, that I would see the dawn today.
While I crib and cry boohoo at my life, there are folks who struggle physically, mentally, and spiritually a lot more than I do.

Even when I thought my world was falling apart, there were so many things that held my body, mind and soul together.
I stood on a mountain, to touch the clouds.
I’ve walked in mossy green forests.
I stood with my beloved under the stars, as it rained light upon us.
I have my health.
I have my friends, young and old, new and old.
I have my mother and the rest of my family.
I have my long suffering, better half. The one who makes life worth living. My rock. My anchor. The one who makes me whole.
I’m surrounded by warmth and love.
I remain blessed.

And so, I remain doggedly, carpe diem-ly, persistent.
I remain grateful.
I will do my best to, as May Swenson² puts it,

Enter each day
as upon a stage
lighted and waiting
for your step

Crave upward as flame
have keenness in the nostril
Give your eyes
to agony or rapture

and to …

Take earth for your own large room
and the floor of the earth
carpeted with sunlight
and hung round with silver wind
for your dancing place

“He’s dead?” said Princess.
[…] “Who told you that?” said Grandad.

“We keep that name moving in the Overhead,” he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly […]
His name is in the code, in the wind, in the rigging, and the shutters.
Haven’t you ever heard the saying,

‘Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’?”

Excerpted from Terry Pratchett’s, Going Postal

For the past twenty years, you’ve been the bane of my existence.
I slept with the phone by the bedside, never knowing when Mummy would call, and one of us would have to come find you, and dig you out of the newest hole you dug for yourself. And none of those years have been harder, than the one where we were estranged for the past year. Two decades of picking up after you had taken their toll.

I told you repeatedly over the years, that while all was always forgiven, it was hard for me to forget. Especially since I lived amidst the wreckage of your actions.
In fits of frustration, I would wail to Abby or Mummy, “Why doesn’t this boy understand?”

Until you decided to move on.

You were always my boy.
I taught you to walk.
I made you laugh.
I taught you cricket. I outgrew it, but it was a lifelong passion with you.

With the exception of your weakness, you were the best of us.
You outsang us in choir, even as a three year old.
You probably were the only person who I’d say was more generous than Daddy was. (to the extent of people taking advantage of your gullibility so many times.)
You had the most joie-de-vivre. You made us laugh.
You were sensitive and kind. Nobody who met you, would come away unhappy or sad.
And for all your foibles, I believe that you loved Mummy and Daddy the most. I might be responsible, Derrick might be caring, but you had the biggest heart.

You gave me your love for animals.
You saved Puppy, by making sure she lived as a puppy.
You jumped into that large stinking drain and pulled her out later, when she got stuck. Foxy, Puppy, Little Puppy, Two Socks, Pink Nose or Popsicle would not be here, if it wasn’t for you.

I might have been the straitlaced one, and you and Derrick have a bond, that is actually brotherly, but both of you had no problems defending an older brother who took life too seriously.
You believed in me blindly. You believed I could be wrong a hundred ways to Sunday, but I would never wrong you intentionally.

So I choose to remember everything that was good about you.
Derrick told me, your last words to him were, “Good, you came.”
I want to imagine you only held on, until you felt like you were back home.
And now that you’re with Daddy, I hope to see you one day, and I hope you tell me, “Good, you came” too.
You will always be my boy.
I love you.

It’s September! Time for a new letter :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals.

Leo Babauta on the First Two Steps to Creating Resilience

If you’ve known me for any length of time in the past decade, you know I set great store on being Antifragile..
While Leo says these are two beginner steps, to my mind, these two will bear the brunt of all the resiliency / antifragile weight. It’ll take you more than half the way there.

The first step is to remove things that are adding unnecessary stress.
The second step is to do things that help us feel replenished.

Ryan Holiday presents A Practical Philosophy Reading List: A Few Books You Can Actually Use in Real Life

Any philosophy forged in the crucible of action and subject to hardship, endures.
Like Stoicism did.

You must know by now: I don’t believe that philosophy is something for the classroom. It’s something that helps you with life. It shouldn’t be complicated. It shouldn’t be confusing. It should be clear, and it should be usable. As Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man.”

David Ogilvy had skin in the game! Who knew?

Continuing with our theme of action and doing, even the creative process is not all in the mind.
It requires digging down in the mud and blood and sweat and tears …

The Ogilvy agency … was founded by a man who didn’t have an MBA, or even a college degree.
Before he became the King of Madison Avenue, Englishman David Ogilvy was an Oxford dropout who worked as a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a researcher for George Gallup, an agent of the British Intelligence Service during WWII, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.

In fact, while most agencies had subordinates present campaign ideas to clients, Ogilvy often made these presentations himself; he wanted to be directly involved, and felt it made the pitches more memorable (“One orchestra looks like every other orchestra, but there is no confusing one conductor with another”).

Ogilvy also rejected around 60 potential new clients each year. A common reason for this rejection was the chairman’s lack of confidence in the product that a company wanted his agency to pitch. Ogilvy used all the products he advertised, and wouldn’t create campaigns for those he couldn’t personally back, believing that it was “flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy,” and that it was impossible to craft an effective ad for something you couldn’t earnestly get behind …

Until next time!

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New month, new letter!
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the original articles

Maria Popova on How Reading Is Like Love

Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being …

Related watching: Max Joseph’s awesome video on, How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content.
It’s 40 minutes long, but definitely worth every minute of your time.

Ryan Holiday’s 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life

4 - Say no (a lot).
15 - It’s not about routine but about practices.
71 - Go the f*ck to sleep.
81 - Don’t just read books, re-read books.

After all,

Shane Parrish posits Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed

A good metaphor is installing an update to the operating system on your laptop. Would you rather install an update that fixes bugs and improves existing processes, or one that just makes everything run faster?
Obviously, you’d prefer the former. The latter would just lead to more crashes. The same is true for updating your mental operating system.

Have a lovely August! Until next time …

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Snow clouds rolling down a mountain peak, near Se La.
Click to embiggen

I don’t know the name of this bird,
    I only imagine his glittering beak
        tucked in a white wing
                while the clouds—

which he has summoned
    from the north—
        which he has taught
                to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
    into the world below
        like stars, or the feathers
                 of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
    that is asleep now, and silent—
        that has turned itself
                into snow.

White-Eyes, Mary Oliver

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I lost my Mai today.

Until my mid 30s, I rued the gulf that stood between Mai and me.
While my parents insistence on teaching us English, as our primary language has benefited me immensely, in most everything I do, the one thing that I feel sad about is that I speak my mother tongue (Konkani) in a slow halting manner. ¹
Which meant that I never could talk well with my grandmother.
I am one of her oldest grandchildren, and I never got to have heart to heart conversations with her, the way my other cousins did.
And yet …

My earliest memories are full of her.
Mai means mother. Odli Mai (Big Mother) is grandmother.
But to a young me, Mummy was Mother and Mai was grandmother.
Born as I was, to a young girl in her early twenties, what I got from mummy was fierce love and passionate discipline.
What Mai gave me was gentle love and wisdom.
What Mai gave me was a patient ear.
I could talk a mile a minute, and Mai understood nothing of my English gibberish.
She’d just make coo noises and hug me (and then figure out what it was that I just blabbed, from Mummy.)

I know nothing of her childhood or youth.
I know nothing of what she was as a wife and the mistress of the farm, eking a hard existence from the land.
I only know snippets of her, as a mom of a large brood of nine children.
The only thing I know, is that she was my Mai.
And that she loved me as no one else ever could.

I wish I could have kept the shirt, made out the cloth she stole and sneaked into my arms when no one was looking. All because I thought every other godmother gave their god children gifts and mine ought to, too! ²
I wish I could have kept a seed out of all the fruits she plucked for me, from the trees on the farm. (I was too busy sucking on mangoes, and then handing the seeds over to her to throw, while she laughed and howled at me ‘Paara pathlyaan dhaanv’ (Run after that seed)).
I wish I had seen her more, as I began working, as we both grew older.
And yet …

Maybe we did not need language.
She is the reason, I got over my fear of dogs (and other animals).
She is the reason, I still crazily love the outdoors and communing with nature.
She is the reason, I took to stoicism to help me through the storms of life. She was stoicism in action, my modern day Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus all rolled into one.
She is the reason, along with daddy, that I love practicing irrational generosity.

Maybe that is her legacy to me.
I carry her with me.
In my bones, in my marrow.
In my words and deeds.
And just like Shelley never let Keats die, I know, I carry my ancestors with me.
As long I remember them and celebrate their words and deeds, they live.
My father is here.
My nana is here.
Mai is here!

Because her touch and her actions spoke more than language ever could.
To me, Mai means mother or godmother or big mother and grandmother.
Or maybe Mai could just mean a big old heart, full of love.

Now we are here at home, in the little nation
of our marriage, swearing allegiance to the table
we set for lunch or the windchime on the porch,

its easy dissonance. Even in our shared country,
the afternoon allots its golden lines
so that we’re seated, both in shadow, on opposite

ends of a couch and two gray dogs between us.
There are acres of opinions in this house.
I make two cups of tea, two bowls of soup,

divide an apple equally. If I were a patriot,
I would call the blanket we spread across our bed
the only flag—some nights we’ve burned it

with our anger at each other. Some nights
we’ve welcomed the weight, a woolen scratch
on both our skins. My love, I am pledging

to this republic, for however long we stand,
I’ll watch with you the rain’s arrival in our yard.
We’ll lift our faces, together, toward the glistening.

— (Pledge, Jehanne Dubrow)

click to embiggen

…

I said to him: “Mr. Muir, someone told me you did not approve of the word ‘hike.’ Is that so?” His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied: “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike!”

“Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”

— John Muir, A Parable of Sauntering